Family elated abducted teen rescued

Hostage crew rescues girl after fugitive shot and killed by FBI agent

Family members hold candles while wearing t-shirts with missing teenager Hannah Anderson's picture on them during a candlelight vigil for Hannah, her brother Ethan, 8, and the children's mother Christina Anderson at Lindo Lake Park in Lakeside on Friday, August 9, 2013. Ethan and mother Christina have been found dead.
Hayne Palmour IV — UT San Diego

Family members hold candles while wearing t-shirts with missing teenager Hannah Anderson's picture on them during a candlelight vigil for Hannah, her brother Ethan, 8, and the children's mother Christina Anderson at Lindo Lake Park in Lakeside on Friday, August 9, 2013. Ethan and mother Christina have been found dead.
/ UT San Diego

It was there, detectives say, that he killed Hannah’s mother, Christina Anderson, 44, a medical therapist, and set his two-story, log-cabin house on fire. It burned to the ground, and found in the rubble were the remains of Ethan and the family’s dog.

James "Jim" DiMaggio shown in 2011 while hiking in the Ten Lakes area of Yosemite National Park.— Courtesy photo

James "Jim" DiMaggio shown in 2011 while hiking in the Ten Lakes area of Yosemite National Park.
/ Courtesy photo

DiMaggio and Hannah were missing, triggering an Amber Alert that started in San Diego County and spread throughout the West. Broadcast by the media, that alert caught the attention of the horseback riders when they came back from the wilderness area on Wednesday.

Divorced, with no kids of his own, DiMaggio befriended the Andersons years ago through the father, who also worked in the telecommunications industry. He was considered part of the family. The children called him “Uncle Jim.”

When Brett Anderson separated from his wife and moved recently to Tennessee for work, DiMaggio agreed to help watch the children. He took Hannah to gymnastics practice and Ethan to football workouts.

“He looked after those kids like they were his own,” DiMaggio’s sister, Lora Robinson, said last week.

But there were also reports that Hannah had begun to find his attention creepy. A few months ago, he remarked that he had a “crush” on her and if he was her age he would date her, according to one of her friends. When he took Hannah to Hollywood for her 16th birthday in July, they reportedly got into an argument over how much time she spent on her cellphone.

Last weekend, Christina Anderson and her children went to Boulevard to visit DiMaggio. They had been there before, up the dirt road on Ross Avenue. It was a place where they could shoot BB guns and ride motorbikes. A 10-year-old boy from the neighborhood would come over to play.

Christina told her father before the visit that DiMaggio had asked to see them because he was losing the house to foreclosure and moving to Texas, where he was born.

That story appears now to have been a ruse. DiMaggio was a month behind on his mortgage payment, but his sister was going to pay it, said Spanswick, the family friend. And Texas, he said, “was the last place Jim would go. He had nothing but horrible memories there.”

Suicide plan?

DiMaggio moved to Boulevard about four years ago, according to neighbors. He lived by himself with several cats on the property that gave him a view across wide-open spaces and a ribbon of Interstate 8 toward the Anza-Borrego Desert.

The neighbors didn’t know him well. “He was just an ordinary guy,” said one, Sheila Haskett. She remembered how he came by once with a cellphone picture of a dog that had wandered into his yard. He was trying to find the owner.

Mostly the only encounters neighbors had with him were waves exchanged as he drove by on his commutes to and from Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, where he worked for the past 20 years.

The commute was more than an hour each way — “Aah, the smell of brake dust in the morning,” he wrote once on Facebook — but it was worth it to him because of the “peace and tranquillity” he felt when he was home, according to his sister, Lora Robinson.